The Heart of a Scoundrel by Christi Caldwell

brisker pace than Edmund would’ve believed the man possible of, drawing to a stop at Edmund’s table. “R-rutland.” The lecherous beast directed that greeting to Edmund’s partially empty bottle.
    With a deliberate glee for the man’s weakness, he picked up the bottle and poured another glass to the rim. “Sit,” he commanded.
    Lord Waters hefted his corpulent frame into a seat.
    “There is something more I require of you.”
    The other man planted his elbows on the table and the furniture shifted with the abrupt movement, rattling the bottle. He shot a hand out, righting it before it tipped. “I couldn’t get the shawl,” he said on a wheedling tone.
    He flicked a piece of imaginary lint from his sleeve. “As such, you’ve only increased your debt to be paid back with interest.”
    The viscount swiped a hand through his sparse hair. “And you’ll forgive my debts if I help you with the ugly miss?”
    Edmund yawned. “A fat, foul bastard such as yourself has little right to cast aspersions upon the lady’s attributes.” His was spoken as a matter of fact. Crassness had ceased to bother him since he’d become the jaded boy of seven who’d been forced to witness his mother and her lover—a man who also happened to be her brother-in-law. Red suffused the viscount’s fleshy cheeks. It mattered not that the lady in question would one day be his wife. “I need to know the lady’s whereabouts.”
    Lord Waters shifted his enormous belly. “I imagine the Fairfax girl is at some ball or another.”
    He leaned across the table. “Not this moment, you fat fool.”
    The man whitened, but then a knowing glint reflected in his eyes. “Eh, you want to court the gel?” He reached for the bottle. “My daughter would make you a lovely wife.” An image as Phoebe had been last evening, the moon’s light bathing her face in a soft glow, came to mind. Her full lips parted with an unwitting invite in her eyes.
    The viscount noted that imperceptible pause. “Pretty girl, my Phoebe is.” He scratched his paunch. “My younger daughter is even prettier. You’re welcome to either of them. Prettier than the Fairfax chit. That one’s mother was a whore. My wife knew her proper place, gave me a son and allows me to carry on as I will. My girls will do the same.”
    Edmund drew his bottle back, unfazed by the man’s blunt cruelness in talking of his family. Then, when one’s father forced you to watch your mother being tupped by her brother-in-law, everything else ceased to shock. “It matters not if she’s a whore,” he drawled. He expected when they were wed, the lady would have any string of lovers in her bed. That was the way of their world of false propriety.
    Waters frowned at Edmund’s lack of interest in Miss Fairfax’s gentility. “You’re certain you don’t want my Phoebe?” His breath came in little wheezes from the exertion of speaking. “You wed the Fairfax girl and she’ll only give you a bastard. Everyone knows…” Edmund fixed a glare on the man that left those words unfinished. Yes, all of Society knew the scandal that had whirred about of the lady’s family. Honoria Fairfax’s mother had been rumored to spread her thighs for footmen and dukes and everyone in between. Perhaps with their like pasts, they’d suit after all. He didn’t have an interest in innocence. It was the one thing he did not know how to handle, but for the corrupting of it. “I’ve no interest in your daughter,” he said flatly, which wasn’t altogether true. He had very specific interests in the lady, that all connected to the pound of flesh he’d exact.
    A beleaguered sigh escaped the viscount. “Can’t you just court the Fairfax chit as any other of the gents?”
    No, his connection to Miss Fairfax’s aunt made that an impossibility. He leveled the man with an icy stare that silenced any further recommendations or presumptions.
    “Er…right.” He eyed Edmund’s brandy once more and smacked his